##This year is the 50th anniversary of my first record purchase. Up to that point I'd often received albums for Christmas - Top of The Pops 1973 for example, or one of the Wombles albums for kids, released in 1974 - but this was my first and possibly last 7 inch single and I bought it myself after hearing it on the radio and liking it a lot. I can remember going up to the counter in a record shop in Plymouth to get it.
The record was 'Portsmouth' by Mike Oldfield. Actually, it was his version of an early 18th century English folk song and it reached number 3 in the UK singles chart. It was probably my first contact with the genre you might loosely call folk rock, and it marked the start of my music buying life which continues up to now. I've been thinking about the changes in recording format I've used over that period, what worked best for me at different times, and what I prefer now.
One thing to say first about my listening habits - I don't create playlists. With very few exceptions I have always listened to whole albums from start to finish, and having started out with vinyl means I still think of some music in terms of side 1 and side 2 - my mental map of particular tracks relates to where they are in relation to all of the other tracks on the album. This means that whole albums in vinyl or CD format, where the limited licence I've bought to listen to the music comes with a physical object which is likely to last for decades, represents an affordable and very comfortable solution for me.
###Vinyl and cassette
Most of the vinyl albums I still own today were purchased between 1980 and 1990. I always recorded every puchase to cassette tape, because I didn't have a record player in my bedroom at home or when I went away to university, but I did have a Sony Walkman when they became affordable a year or two after their original launch.
Vinyl albums sounded great on my Dad's hi-fi (OK, strictly by audiophile standards it was probably 'mid-fi', but I thought the sound was amazing), and album covers were often gatefold with lots of photos and sometimes an insert booklet containing lyrics or more information about the band, and even posters. Having the physical object made the record owning experience very satisfying; it was about much more than just the sound.
Copies I made on cassette tape on Dad's hi-fi (or copies of albums made by friends at school) were surprisingly good, and I always bought TDK tapes which seemed reliable - I have some from the early '80s which still work now, including a recording of the last 2 hours of The Radio Caroline[1] Top 500 which was broadcast on Medium Wave from their ship in the North Sea over the Easter weekend of 1984. Occasionally when I was away at university I bought pre-recorded cassette versions of albums because if I bought vinyl I'd have to wait until the holidays to listen to it and to make my own copy, but the quality was often variable. For example, a cassette with Jean Michel Jarre's Equinox on one side and Oxygene on the other contained far too much tape and it never ran at the correct speed, ending up being chewed to pieces by one machine or another.
###CD
By the time affordable CD players started appearing on the market in the late '80s I had left university and got a job, so (hurrah!) I could get one and start buying CDs. Like my vinyl albums, I still have every CD I ever bought, and without exception even those which are almost 40 years old still work.
The debate which once existed about whether the sound was better from vinyl or CD wasn't very interesting at the time and doesn't bother me now. I've listened to the same album in both formats using the same amplifier and speakers and if I can hear a difference (which I wouldn't always swear to) it's often not so great that I really have a preference. I think it probably depends on the quality of the mastering on whichever format you've got, but in both cases having a physical object with a booklet and photos makes either of them more meaningful for me than any kind of streaming or downloaded copy.
The other great thing about CDs in particular is that it seems a significant proportion of all of them ever made still exist and in many cases they can be purchased cheaply second hand. What's more, they are easy to rip to MP3 for use when on the move (Sound Juicer on Linux to FLAC, then Sound Converter from FLAC to MP3 - Sound Juicer has a bug which means if you rip straight to MP3 you only get a 32kbps file. If you have a better workflow on Linux, email and let me know). I've been filling gaps in my collection for very little money and playing them on a Tivoli Audio CD player which is connected to the line-in socket on some decent powered speakers, and the sound is as good as it ever was. What I do with the ripped MP3s I'll cover below.
###iTunes and CD-R or iPod / iPhone
I bought an iMac G3, the one with the colourful translucent top cover which meant you could see all of the electronics inside, in about 2001 or 2002. If iTunes wasn't already available at the time then it was soon afterwards, and I made a lot of CD-R copies of albums I bought there, which was really convenient. Even if the cost didn't seem to represent good value for money, at least you could listen to short clips of tracks before you decided to buy them. As I recall the bitrate used by Apple wasn't great, but it was good enough.
Then the iPod Classic came along and changed things again. Even more convenient than making CD-R copies, I think this was one of my favourite combinations. The hard drive in the Classic failed eventually and it was replaced with a Touch, which was excellent and a step in the direction of the smartphone. At the time I had a Blackberry from work, but in due course the iPhone appeared and replaced Blackberries, and I carried on using iTunes with that.
###Spotify and Bandcamp
I don't recall when I joined Spotify, but it must have been soon after it launched on mobiles in the UK, which was around 2010. Endless choice, available immediately with no incremental cost beyond the monthly charge, it seemed like the ideal solution. I continued with it for years, until I started reading about how little of my money was going to the artists and also I realised that I was mostly paying to rent the relatively few albums I listened to over and over again. Spotify premium costs £12.99 a month in the UK but when I stopped paying I lost access except for restricted random listening. For about the same amount of money I can buy at least two or three second hand CDs or one or two new ones on Bandcamp, that will hopefully last as many more decades as I will.
At this stage of my life I find that my musical tastes are broader than they have ever been. Like the late John Peel[2] (and how is it possible that he's been gone for over 20 years?) I find that I just want to hear something new, which could be something old and just new to me, and I find a great deal to my liking on Bandcamp. Its business model[3] seems to favour the artists to a far greater extent than Spotify too.
##What I do now
My current approach is to look for new music on Bandcamp and when I find something I like, I buy it. It's not usually expensive, and when available I'll buy albums from there in CD format, but otherwise I download the FLAC version and make my own. For older music I don't already own there is eBay and a vast choice of CDs, and of course I still have all the CDs I ever bought. I'm making new higher quality MP3 copies of those I want to listen to when I'm on the move, because originally like everyone else I was constrained by storage space and so I extracted to 128kbps and now I'm slowly making new copies at 320kbps - I can sometimes hear a difference between 128 and 320, but any higher seems to be a waste of time when listening over Bluetooth. For portable listening I copy MP3s to my offline Android smartphone and listen with the Musicolet player app and bluetooth headphones. For now this seems to be the optimal approach.
I did briefly subscribe to Qobus and tried out some very high quality files using a FiiO DAC and expensive headphones, but the difference to my old ears wasn't great enough to justify the expense.
So that's it, five decades of buying music. In the '80s my money was helping wealthy prog-rock musicians to buy Scottish islands, and in the 2020s I'm doing a little to support young artists.
If you enjoyed reading this, get in touch and let me know about your own music buying history.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Caroline#
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Peel
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandcamp#Business_model